Audio Blogging: Is this the game-changer?

Wow. I don’t quite know why the first one didn’t materialise in the same spectacular fashion as the second – it’s actually in Gaelic – but hey, who’s complaining? A train of thought has been bugging me for some time, basically to do with literacy and oracy and the relative weight or “prestige” accorded to each. My preceding post, for those that don’t read Gaelic, basically ponders a catch-22 inherent in trying to reach through the written word an audience that prefers speech. I picked on Gaelic, but no doubt there are plenty other examples.

Anyway, online communities, fora, twitterers etc are all very well, and probably particularly good at pulling in enthusiastic new learners, but to the extent that they’re text-based they’re a closed book to non-readers. So a google search starting with “audio twitter” eventually brought me to this: www.ipadio.com. I’m no nerd but it actually took me no time at all to set up an account and record my first “phonecast”. All you do is phone it in. What could be simpler?

I think the problem here is quite simple:
It’s easier for a layman to write something that reads sensibly and easily than to speak in an interesting and concise manner. Video podcasts have been touted as the “next big thing” for several years now, but really they’re only popular within closed circles of people, because to be frank, most people waffle, go off on tangents etc.

I once sat through someone wittering for half-an-hour, when if he’d written it down instead he wouldn’t have kept going off track and it probably would have taken me 5 minutes to read his main points.

Ok, maybe he could have planned it and scripted it before he recorded it, and then it may have taken a lot less time. But here’s a real Catch fichead s a dhà:

Well, I’m interested in accentuating the positive. In that spirit, and speaking in general terms, here are some possible answers to your conundrum. You could, say, draw a storyboard (like my kids used to do before writing an essay for school), or a “mind map”, or (whisper it) make up your own orthography even (I can’t write the Urdu script to save my life), or hey, maybe make notes in one of the languages that you did get taught in school… Not the perfect solution, granted, but if it means it gives you the confidence that makes the difference between remaining silent and making a contribution then, for my money, it’s worth a go. Plus, in the case of Gaelic, it’s not as if there hasn’t been a long and strong oral tradition – degraded though it now may be.

In any case I think more people can put together 2 to 3 minutes on the telephone off the top of their heads than you may be allowing for. They might even get a taste for it – and who knows where that might lead, perhaps to the nearest evening class?

You’re maybe familiar with Will Lamb’s work – the kind of stuff he gets up to when he can tear himself away from drumming with the band:) The basic point is that there are differences between spoken and written language. Nobody talks like Jane Austen writes. Here’s a chance, maybe, to make more speech more readily available. OK, so “game-changer” may be a tad optimistic. It could have been worse – I could have used “silver bullet” – and there certainly ain’t one of them around.

Yes, there are “bad” speakers, just like there are “bad” writers. Maybe the ones who “witter” on will cut it down a bit when the phone bill comes in…?

Maybe an experiment could be done with a text/audio forum? Text in English, audio responses in Gaelic. After all on Fòram na Gàidhlig you have bilingual threads, Gàidhlig a-mhàin, and threads where people enter a Gaelic written conversation with English – they can understand the Gaelic but have better writing skills in English.
Would anyone bother to take part though?

‘* Voice is rising in importance: You an post a buzz using only voice from your mobile device (read: while driving). This is one reason why Google has been working (through Goog411) to get better and better at voice recognition. Will the keyboard become less important? Will we post more when all we have to do is talk? Will Google then have more to organize for us?’

‘* Social. Google has tried to attack social before and failed. Microsoftlike, it’s trying again. I am disappointed that its interface with Twitter, for example, is only one-way: I can bring Twitter into Buzz but not use Buzz to publish to Twitter. Silly. I’ve long said that the winner in social is not a site; the internet is our social network. The winner will be the company that helps us organize that. To do that, it must be open to all input and output. That’s where we should be looking with Google and Facebook. In that sense, Twitter is ahead of both of them.’